EPA Contests Looser Curbs on Nuclear Waste Disposal

The Environmental Protection Agency Thursday took issue with a new plan to allow low-level nuclear waste to be treated as normal garbage and a California congressman said that he will move to prevent the preempting of state laws banning the material from local landfills.

EPA officials, testifying at a hearing before the House Interior and Insular Affairs energy and environment subcommittee, said that adequate health and safety precautions are lacking in the plan to declare certain wastes “below regulatory concern.”

Under a proposed policy revealed last month, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials intend to simplify a regulatory morass by allowing radioactive wastes that it deems to have negligible risk to be recycled, incinerated or placed in landfills rather than being sent to federally regulated nuclear dumps.

The plan, debated within the commission for more than two years, brought an angry reaction from several environmental groups and from state officials, who expressed concern that their landfills will become dumping grounds for nuclear wastes in spite of local prohibitions.

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) said that he will introduce legislation to prevent the NRC from preempting state laws. California already allows medical waste to be buried in ordinary landfills. In sometimes heated exchanges with Miller Thursday, NRC Chairman Kenneth M. Carr brushed aside EPA criticisms as differences over detail. Carr insisted that the NRC will make sure that potential radiation exposures under the new practice would remain low for both individuals and the public.

The material likely to be affected by the proposed policy includes low-level waste generated by nuclear power plants, research facilities and medical institutions, including such things as cleaning rags, discarded clothing, bedding and tracers used in medical diagnoses. By some estimates, such material accounts for 30% of the waste now regulated by the NRC.

Carr said that the guidelines to be used in declaring material below regulatory interest are within levels endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and by a National Academy of Sciences panel of radiation experts.

But an internal EPA memorandum released by the subcommittee labeled as too high the 10-millirem-per-year individual dose proposed by the NRC as the limit for deregulated material.

“We believe this is too high a level for a blanket deregulation criteria,” the memo said, “and is not protective of the public health.

“Numerous standards established by the EPA, including those for drinking water, set upper limits of risk at lower levels.”

The EPA memorandum estimated that a lifetime exposure to a 10-millirem dose carries a 3-in-10,000 risk of cancer. A 10-millirem exposure is less than a diagnostic X-ray and compares to natural exposure of about 300 millirem per year from background sources such as cosmic radiation, food, and drink, soils and building materials.

At the time it announced the new policy in June, NRC officials put the increased risk at 5 in 100,000. But Miller later released agency documents showing that Robert Bernaro, director of the commission’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety, had argued for an exposure limit of one millirem per year instead of 10.

Officials estimate that it would take five years for the regulations to be drawn and the new policy to be put into effect.

State officials from Maine, Illinois, West Virginia and Pennsylvania told the committee Thursday that they oppose the plan because they see the NRC preempting state laws.